I saw Nikole Hannah-Jones speak at Hofstra University where I teach back in the days before the Pandemic. She spoke in the largest theater on campus and the place was rocking with teenagers from nearby Hempstead and Freeport anxious to connect with the writer who created the 1619 Project at the New York Times. Hannah-Jones came out to cheers from the high school kids who filled the room. She spoke about serious historical subjects, painful ones for kids whose ancestors had been enslaved 160 years ago and whose grandparents had not been able to vote 66 years ago. She took questions from the admiring students who seemed to have read every bit of the history series. Then an adult asked her to respond to all the criticism she and 1619 received. She looked tired and sad as she responded. She was particularly affected by criticism of her historical interpretation by five academic historians, all well-known in their fields.
Now, the 1619 Project is coming out as a book. A new round of denunciations has begun. Donald a number of Republican governors have denounced the book before it is even published. In the time between the publication of the articles in the series and the books publication, a lot has changes. The 1776 Project, set up as a right-wing mimic of 1619, was touted by Donald Trump and was funded by the government. George Floyd’s killing has driven an unprecedented number of Americans to read about our savage history of racial repression. Statues that seemed part of the natural scenery in the South have come down. Yet, 1619 resumed its place at the center of the debate over American history as soon as its publication date was set.
Which is weird. The Project was, after all, a bunch of articles in a newspaper magazine. A magazine the paper puts out each week without a lot of attention. Part of the reason the Project has been such a phenomenon is the vituperative attack on it. If contemporary white nationalists are afraid of it, it must have something at its core that frightens them.
This week’s New York Times Magazine includes an essay by Times editor Jake Silverstein. He describes the central thesis of the 1619 Project:
The reasoning behind this is simple: Enslavement is not marginal to the history of the United States; it is inextricable. So many of our traditions and institutions were shaped by slavery, and so many of our persistent racial inequalities stem from its enduring legacy. Identifying the start of such a vast and complex system is a somewhat symbolic act. It was not until the late 1600s that slavery became codified with new laws in various colonies that firmly established the institution’s racial basis and dehumanizing structure. But 1619 marks the earliest beginnings of what would become this system. (It also could be said to mark the earliest beginnings of what would become American democracy: In July of that year, just weeks before the White Lion arrived in Point Comfort with its human cargo, the Virginia General Assembly was called to order, the first elected legislative body in English America.)
But the argument for 1619 as our origin point goes beyond the centrality of slavery; 1619 was also the year that a heroic and generative process commenced, one by which enslaved Africans and their free descendants would profoundly alter the direction and character of the country, having an impact on everything from politics to popular culture. “Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, and it is difficult to argue against extending his point through the century to follow, one that featured a Black civil rights struggle that transformed American democracy and the birth of numerous Black art forms that have profoundly influenced global culture. The 1619 Project made the provocative case that the start of the African presence in the English North American colonies could be considered the moment of inception of the United States of America.
Silverstein writes that criticism from professional historians came soon after publication:
Substantive criticisms of the project began a few months later. Five historians, led by the Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, sent a letter that asked The Times to issue “prominent corrections” for what they claimed were the project’s “errors and distortions.” We took this letter very seriously. The criticism focused mostly on Nikole’s introductory essay and within that essay zeroed in on her argument about the role of slavery in the American Revolution: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” Nikole wrote, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Though we recognized that the role of slavery is a matter of ongoing debate among historians of the revolution, we did not agree that this line or the other passages in question required “prominent corrections,” as I explained in a letter of response. Ultimately, however, we issued a clarification, accompanied by a lengthy editors’ note: By saying that protecting slavery was “one of the primary reasons,” Nikole did not mean to imply that it was a primary reason for every one of the colonists, who were, after all, a geographically and culturally diverse lot with varying interests; rather, she meant that one of the primary reasons driving some of them, particularly those from the Southern colonies, was the protection of slavery from British meddling. We clarified this by adding “some of” to Nikole’s original sentence so that it read: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
We published the letter from the five historians, along with my response, a few days before Christmas. Dozens of media outlets covered the exchange, and the coverage set certain corners of social media ablaze — which fueled more stories, which led others to weigh in. The editor of The American Historical Review, the journal of the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest professional association of historians, noted in an editor’s letter that the controversy was “all anyone asked me about at the A.H.A.’s annual meeting during the first week of January.”
When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted last year, the 1619 Project, always criticized by those on the right, got targeted criticism. Silverstein recalls:
It was around this time that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced a bill called the Saving American History Act, which would “prohibit federal funds from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary schools and secondary schools, and for other purposes.” Cotton, who just weeks earlier published a column in The New York Times’s Opinion section calling for federal troops to subdue demonstrations, stated that the project “threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.” (The “curriculum” Cotton’s legislation referred to was a set of educational materials put together not by The Times but by the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit organization that supports global journalism and, in certain instances, helps teachers bring that work into classrooms. Since 2007, the Pulitzer Center, which has no relationship to the Pulitzer Prizes, has created lesson plans around dozens of works of journalism, including three different projects from The Times Magazine. To date, thousands of educators in all 50 states have made use of the Pulitzer Center’s educational materials based on the 1619 Project to supplement — not replace — their standard social studies and history curriculums.)
Cotton’s bill did not move forward, but it inspired many similar efforts, perhaps most prominently the 1776 Commission, an advisory committee formed by President Donald Trump to respond to the 1619 Project and other attempts to advance a more complicated narrative of the American past. Referring to an academic framework that seeks to locate the ways racism affects the law and other institutions, Trump said, “Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” Instead, Trump’s commission would promote “patriotic education” focused on “the legacy of 1776.” This never got very far. The committee’s members issued a report on Jan. 18, just weeks after the failed insurrection in Trump’s name at the U.S. Capitol, but it was widely criticized by historians, and one of Joe Biden’s first acts as president was to disband the 1776 Commission altogether.
This barely mattered. In the United States, the real decisions over education are left to local governments and state legislatures, and the Republican Party has been steadily gaining control of legislatures in the last decade. Today the party holds full power in 30 state houses, and as the 2021 sessions got underway, Republican lawmakers from South Carolina to Idaho proposed laws echoing the language and intent of Cotton’s bill and Trump’s commission. By the end of the summer, 27 states had introduced strikingly similar versions of a “divisive concepts” bill, which swirled together misrepresentations of critical race theory and the 1619 Project with extreme examples of the diversity training that had proliferated since the previous summer. The list of these divisive concepts, which the laws would prohibit from being discussed in classrooms, included such ideas as “one race, ethnic group or sex is inherently morally or intellectually superior to another race, ethnic group or sex” and “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, ethnicity or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race, ethnic group or sex,” as Arizona House Bill 2898 put it. To be clear, these notions aren’t found in the 1619 Project or in any but the most fringe writings by adherents of critical race theory, but the legislation aimed at something broader. “The clear goal of these efforts is to suppress teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States,” the A.H.A. and three other associations declared in a statement in June. “But the ideal of informed citizenship necessitates an educated public.” Eventually, more than 150 professional organizations would sign this letter, including the Society of Civil War Historians, the National Education Association, the Midwestern History Association and the Organization of American Historians.
Nevertheless, by late August, the two-year anniversary of the 1619 Project, 12 states had enacted some form of these bans. In Florida, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to prohibit the teaching of the project at a meeting in June, following a brief address from Gov. Ron DeSantis, in which he explained his opposition (mischaracterizing, as was so often the case, the claim from Nikole’s essay that the original five historians seized on):
This 1619 Project that came out a couple years ago, the folks who created that said that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery. Now, that is factually false. That is something that you can look at the historical record. You want to know why they revolted against Britain? They told us. They wrote pamphlets, they did committees of correspondence, they did a Declaration of Independence. … I think it’s really important that when we’re doing history, when we’re doing things like civics, that it is grounded in actual fact, and I think we’ve got to have an education system that is preferring fact over narratives.
A curious feature of this argument on behalf of the historical record is how ahistorical it is. In privileging “actual fact” over “narrative,” the governor, and many others, seem to proceed from the premise that history is a fixed thing; that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identified the relevant set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations to simply protect and disseminate them. This conception denies history its own history — the dynamic, contested and frankly pretty thrilling process by which an understanding of the past is formed and reformed. The study of this is known as historiography, and a knowledge of American historiography, in particular the way our historical profession evolved to take fuller account of the role of slavery and racism in our past, is critical to understanding the debates of the past two years.
I will leave you to read the full article in the Times.
Bravo, Patrick! Certainly one of your best essays, in a long line that provides considerable competition.
Excellent article and clarification! On point! History is dynamic and our goal always should be to better understand it and how it influences us today!